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Don’t Be Hatin’ on the Mouse

It was announced yesterday that Disney was buying Lucasfilm for an obscene amount of money.

George Lucas has been thinking for the past 4 or 5 years about how to handle his creative properties after he officially retires and beyond. He began to structure a post-Lucas Lucasfilm a little more than a year ago and they announced some of the details yesterday.

Veteran Producer of innumerable blockbusters, Kathleen Kennedy will become the head of the new mouse-ified Lucasfilm. Star Wars will become an even bigger presence in the Disney Parks and merchandising. But perhaps the biggest bit of news is that Star Wars is returning to the big screen with new installments!!

Part of yesterday’s announcement was to reveal that Episode VII is tentatively set to hit movie theaters in 2015. The intention is then to have an Episode VIII and IX come out every two to three years after that (traditional Star Wars timing is three years between episodes in each trilogy).

Lucas is to act as a ‘creative consultant’. What that means exactly is unknown – Star Wars is, after all, his baby… no matter what anyone thinks about Lucas’ poor showings as writer and director since about 1978. But it would seem that the nuts and bolts of creating Star Wars cinematic entertainment will be in the hands of someone else.

It is believed that the problem with the prequels was not just that Lucas had lost his touch as a writer and director. Rather, the biggest problem was that he had lost his touch and was micro-managing everything. And since George Lucas was George Lucas, no one had the wookies to stand up to him. The result was an uneven mess of self-indulgent filmmaking that will probably be studied in Film Schools for the next century as examples of how not to make good movies.

So, the news that there are going to be more Star Wars movies andthat George Lucas would only have a limited role in making them should be very welcome news to Star Wars fans out there.

But, there is a sub-group of Star Wars lovers that we call Fan Boys that is less than enthusiastic about the news. Providing more justification for my inherent distaste for them, their favorite weapon is snotty mockery. Since they, of course, are the arbiters of the secret correct way to produce entertainment in nerd-dom, they criticize any other approach that actually happens.

I just wanted to use this QuickThought to say that Disney taking over Lucasfilm and producing more live action Star Wars movies is a good thing. Period. There’s a chance it could go wrong, but I am cautiously optimistic. It’s a simple equation…

More Star Wars = Good.

More Star Wars – George Lucas = Better.

Star Wars movies have always been (geeky) family entertainment. Disney is the perfect company to bring us more Star Wars.